The third piece in our series of works for the Barbican exploring the role of digital technology in audience evaluation and participation. Working with the Barbican centre learning programs, we developed a prototype visualisation to explore the identity of members of the Barbican audience.
Asking what three words each audience member would use to describe themselves the visualisation automatically updated, revealing frequently used words such as ‘creative’, ‘friendly’, ‘londoner’ , we also asked what three words they thought society as a whole would use to describe them – with ‘foreign’ ‘female’ and’ ‘british’ leading in the most popular responses.
On a practical level this piece not only questions the biases we apply when answering audience evaluation questionaires but more fundamentally the differences we perceive between our internalised identities and those that we feel we exhibit to the world around us.
